Python Regex how to match a substring without replace a part of that

Question

I have the following sentence:

sentence = "Work \nExperience \n\n First Experience..."

Work 
Experience 

 First Experience...

So, I want to remove the "\n" between Work and Experience, but at the same time I don't want remove "\n\n" after Experience.

Work Experience 

First Experience...

I've tried different solution like:

string = re.sub(" \n{1}[^\n]"," ",sentence)

but all of them remove the first character after \n (E).

Update: I managed to find the solution thanks to @Wiktor

print(re.sub(r'\w .*?\w+', lambda x: x.group().replace('\n', ''), sentence, flags=re.S))

Wiktor Stribiżew · Accepted Answer · 2020-11-26 13:10:15Z

1

If you want to make it a generic solution to remove any amount of \n, a newline, in between two strings, you can use

import re
sentence = "Work \nExperience \n\n First Experience..."
print( re.sub(r'Work.*?Experience', lambda x: x.group().replace('\n', ''), sentence, flags=re.S) )

See the Python demo. Output:

Work Experience 

 First Experience...

The Work.*?Experience with re.S matches any substrings between (and including) Work and Experience and then the match data object (x) is processed upon each match when all newlines are removed usign .replace('\n', '') and these modified strings are returned as replacement patterns to re.sub.

answered Nov 26, 2020 at 13:10

Wiktor Stribiżew

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7 Comments

Zast Over a year ago

Thanks for the answer ! What if I had a big text in which this problem is repeated not only for this case, but also for other sentences? I've tried intuitively with: re.sub(r'\w .*?\w', lambda x: x.group().replace('\n', ''), sentence, flags=re.S) but obviousely it doesn't work well

Wiktor Stribiżew Over a year ago

@sergiozavota Start from the very beginning with requirements. What should you match start with? What should it end with?

Zast Over a year ago

The words are not "static", so you could have sentence1 = "Work \nExperience \n\n First Experience..." sentence2 = "Sergio \nZavota \n\n Second Experience..." sentence3 = "Wiktor \nStribiżew \n\n Third Experience..." etc..

Wiktor Stribiżew Over a year ago

@sergiozavota So what is the pattern? What is regular here? How can we know that we need to match from Wiktor to Stribiżew?

Wiktor Stribiżew Over a year ago

@sergiozavota Glad you found it out. Also, you could use a word boundary rather than space: r'\w\b.*?\w+'

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